Flex app bookmark issue / "#" at end of url
I work in an area where business users rely heavily on bookmarks to access their work-related web applications. Our standard browser is Internet Explorer v6. We have a new Flex application - when you add a site to Internet Explorer Favorites and then try to access the site using the Favorites link, the following error appears: "Internet Explorer cannot open the internet site http: // our url. Operation aborted ". If we then output the properties for the link and remove the trailing "#" from the URL, the link works.
What is this "#" and can it be removed? Is there a way for Internet Explorer bookmarks to work on this site (other than manually editing the bookmark)? The problem does not occur in Firefox (but not everyone has access to this browser).
The trailing # is used to provide information on your client side. It was originally intended to provide the ability to snap to anchor points in an HTML document. It has been hijacked by JavaScript frameworks to provide state information for Flash and Flex applications.
The main benefit of using # for navigation is that the browser doesn't move from the current page - this means you only need to load your framework once. Traditional URLs will force the entire page to reload.
You most likely won't be able to remove it. You should be able to provide a facility for a secondary URL scheme that encodes what you need in the query string (? Foobar = 1).
You will need to set up server side processing to either redirect the user to a hash url or load the required information using JavaScript binding to your Flex framework.
You can also check out the new Google Chrome plugin for IE.
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